I am a pirate

Thank y'all!

This is going to be a motivational speech.

Because imagine my motivation standing
between this strong, healthy crowd --

and lunch.

(Laughter)

I'm @Falkvinge on twitter.

Feel free to quote me if I say something
memorable, stupid, funny, whatever.

I love seeing my name on twitter.

So hi! I'm Rick.
I'm a politician.

I'm sorry.

How many in here have heard
of the Swedish Pirate Party before?

Let's see a show of hands.

Okay, that's practically everybody.

Probably due to the fact that
we are Sweden's neighbor.

I frequently ask how many have heard
of any other political party

and there's always just
scattered hands in the audience

compared to this first question
which is one-half to two-thirds.

This is actually the first time ever
that does not match.

It was practically everybody.

So, for those who haven't heard of us.

Well, the Pirate Party, we love the net.

We love copying and sharing and
we love civil liberties.

For that, some people call us pirates.

Probably in an attempt to make us
bow our heads and feel shame.

That didn't work very well.

We decided to stay
and tell about it instead.

And so in 2006,
I founded a new political party.

I led it for its first five years
and the European elections.

The last European elections, we became
the largest party

and the most coveted
youth demographic, sub 30.

And what's interesting is we did that

on less than one percent
of the competition's budget.

We had a campaign budget
total of 50,000 Euros.

They had six million between them
-- and we beat them.

That gave us a cost-efficiency advantage
of over two orders of magnitude.

And I'm gonna share the secret recipe
of how we did that.

We developed swarm methodologies.

And they can be applied
to any business or social cause.

Well, almost any --

there's a small asterisk by the end
and I'll get to that, in just a minute.

But applying these --
and we've done this dozens of times --

we know that this works.

We've put two people
in the European Parliament,

we've put 45 people in various
German state parliaments,

we're in the Icelandic Parliament,

the Czech senate,
many, many, many more,

local councils and as said,
we've spread to 70 countries.

And that's not bad

for a political movement that hasn't
even been around for a decade.

So today we're going to talk a bit

about how people are motivated
to be part of change,

to be part of something bigger
than themselves.

And how you can channel this
into an organization that harnesses

this great power of wanting to make
the world a better place.

And in the end, come out
a little on the better.

When I speak to business people,
I frequently make them very upset.

When I contradict them
and say that no,

your employees are not
your most valuable asset.

Your most valuable asset
is the thousands of people

who want to work for you for free,
and you don't let them.

They get very upset about that.

A swarm is a congregation of
tens of thousands of volunteers

that have chosen of their own will
to converge on a common goal.

There's this Futurama quote:

When push comes to shove,
you gotta do what you love --

even if it's a bad idea.

I mean, seriously,
what kind of idiot thinks

they can change the world
by starting a political party?

This kind of idiot, apparently.

But it works!

What you need to do is to put a stake in the ground. You need to announce your goal. Just say I want to accomplish this, I'm going to do this. And it doesn't need to be very costly. My announcement was just two lines in a chat channel. Hey look, the Pirate Party has its website up now after New Years and the address. That was all the advertising I ever did. The next time I had several hundred activists wanting to work with us. When you provide such a focus point, a swarm intelligence emerges. When people can rally to a flag. And that's what gives you this two orders of magnitude of cost-efficiency. It's a huge advantage, you're running circles around all the legacy organizations. And there are four goals that need to be fulfilled in your goal in order for this to work.